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with that?” Stella asked.
    Mattie nodded.
    “How come you’re decorating the fence and the porch railing with flowers?”
    Mattie explained that her grandparents were coming for supper and she wanted everything to look nice.
    Stella smiled. “That makes sense to me.”
    Sometimes, like now, Mattie thought she and Stella were more like twins than she and Mark. They liked many of the same things, and Stella wasn’t a big tease who liked to play tricks. She didn’t use big words like Mark did either. Of course, Stella didn’t look anything like Mattie. She had dark brown hair and matching eyes, and there was not one freckle on her nose.
    As the girls wrapped the flower stems around the porch railing, they talked about school, how it would be starting up again in a few weeks, and how much they’d miss staying at home.
    “The reason I don’t like school is because I have a hard time learning some things, and Mark always does so well—especially with spelling,” Mattie said. “He knows so many big words, and hardly ever misses any of the words on our spelling tests. Sometimes I feel really dumm when I’m around my twin bruder—especially when he uses big words I can’t even say. I think he just does it for attention,” she said. “It probably makes him feel big and important if he can say words I don’t understand.”
    “Do you think Mark is full of
hochmut
?” Stella asked.
    Mattie shrugged. “He might be full of pride, but we’re taught in our church that it’s wrong to be prideful, so if he is, then he’s not setting a good example to others.”
    “That’s true, but nobody’s perfect,” Stella said.
    Mattie gave a nod.
    “Are you excited about your ninth birthday coming up soon?” Stella asked, changing the subject.
    “I sure am, and I’m hoping for a bicycle. Mark wants one, too. Even though we live fairly close to the school, it would be a lot quicker for us to get there every day if we didn’t have to walk.”
    “I know. I’m thankful for the bike my folks gave me for Christmas last year,” Stella said. “I can pedal to school in half the time it took me to walk. And I don’t have to carry my schoolbooks now, because there’s a basket on my bike.”
    “Mark and I have both mentioned to Mom and Dad that we’d like a bicycle, so I hope they’ve been listening. If I get a bike with a basket, I’ll decorate it with flowers. ‘Course Mark will probably say that’s girl stuff,” Mattie said. “But then he does a lot of boy stuff I’d never do, too.”
    Mattie proceeded to tell Stella how Mark had been lifted off the roof of the chicken coop using Dad’s umbrella and landed in a pile of manure.
    Stella wrinkled her nose. “Eww … that must have smelled baremlich. I bet he looked pretty funny sitting in that awful stuff.”
    “You’re right, he did smell terrible, and he looked really funny. It was hard for me not to laugh, ‘cause it really served him right.” Mattie snickered. “Mom wasn’t happy about the smelly clothes or the broken umbrella, but at least Mark didn’t get hurt.”
    Then Mattie told Stella how Mark had put the frog in the sugar bowl, hoping to scare her with it. “Dad wasn’t happy about him startling Mom like that, and now Mark has extra chores to do,” she added.
    “I think he had it coming after doing two bad things in one day.” Stella shook her head slowly. “Sometimes my bruder does things that get him in trouble.”
    “Guess we girls do, too, but since Mark’s such a big tease and likes to play tricks, he gets in trouble a lot more than I do.” Mattie stopped talking and took in a quick breath; then she went on to tell Stella about the little game she and Mark had played with her being blindfolded and how she’d ended up ruining some of Mom’s flowers.
    “It sounds like that game wasn’t much fun at all.”
    “Nope, it sure wasn’t.”
    “Looks like we’re out of flowers,” Stella said, changing the subject. “So can we do